Audio is generally recorded so as to provide a record copy of an occasion such as, for example, a meeting, an interview or a performance involving two or more sources of audio or participants.
For example, for journalist interviews, business meetings and courtroom trials, it is important to have a verbatim recorded record of the interviews, meetings and trials to ensure that everything that has been said has been captured and can be accurately referred to at a later date. This applies equally to more structured meeting environments in offices.
However, referring to FIG. 1A, the quality of these recordings is often extremely poor, as a single device 10, such as a Dictaphone or digital voice recorder is used to capture the audio, for example, speech, from a plurality of sources and/or participants 12a, 12b, 12c, 12d and 12e. Similarly, meetings undertaken through conference calls are often made using a single conference phone which usually results in unreliable and often poor audio capture.
The reason for this is that the further away from the microphone a person is, the less clear the resulting audio is. This is known in speech-recognition as “far field” audio capture.
To overcome this, an array of microphones 14a-14h can be installed, for example, in a board room or interview room, as shown in FIG. 1B. These consist of multiple microphones places in fixed positions. Each individual microphone captures a separate audio stream, and these are then post-processed using a technique called “beamforming” which allows individual audio streams to be reconstructed. This technique relies upon the different speeds at which the same audio signal reaches each microphone
These fixed microphone setups are effective in overcoming the “far field” problem, but are relatively expensive and require infrastructure to be put in place prior to meetings taking place. Moreover, because of the nature of this setup being of fixed microphones, it does not overcome problems associated with recording of conference call meetings when two or more participants are remote from each other.
Accordingly, there is a need in the industry for there to be a media recording system and method which addresses the disadvantages of known systems and methods.
An objective of the present disclosure is to provide a media recording system and method which is inexpensive and provides quality recording of audio for both local recording, wherein audio sources and/or participants are in relatively close proximity, and remote recording, wherein audio sources and/or participants are relatively remote from each other, for example, in different offices, cities or countries. There is also the associated problem that participants who are geographically separated will experience different time delays and the can be a persistent problem of people talking over one another as they do not correctly anticipate another person is finished speaking due to the time delay.